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Game On?


2008-03-06 17:39:31
By: Gene Bromberg

The gauntlet was thrown down. The challenger knelt and picked it up. All that remains is for the combatants to choose their ground and commence the battle. I'm of course referring to the proposed heads-up cash game between Phil Hellmuth and Tom "durrrr" Dwan. A quick summary--Dwan knocked Phil out of the NBC National Heads-Up Championships on the third hand when his Tens cracked Phil's Aces. Phil told Dwan he didn't much like his play, so durrrr challenged Phil to a $100,000 heads-up match.

Which Phil accepted...with a few caveats. He wants to play close to home, at a casino in the Bay Area. He wants to play during the day, not in the wee hours. And Phil wants the freedom to pick the date.

The poker forums of course lit up at the prospect of a durrrr-Hellmuth match. The online wunderkind against the 11-time bracelet winner. Posters bickered back and forth about who would win, while others opined that the match would never take place. Helping to stir the pot today was well-known and -respected tournament director Matt Savage. who offered to hold the match at the Bay 101 casino during the WPT Shooting Star event.

There's one little problem--there's a prohibition on no-limit games in San Jose (they get an exemption for the Shooting Star tournament). So they'd have to play spread-limit, which isn't exactly what either player probably wants. And Phil said he's not going to be at Bay 101 until the 11th, so finding an exact time to hold the match might pose another problem.

But if it comes off it would be a huge poker event. Old school vs. new, live vs. online, tournament titan vs. cash game monster. Could this be a start of another great leap in poker programming--impromptu high-stakes games? What with streaming video these days it wouldn't take that much time (or money) to film a grudge match like this and broadcast it on the web. The "Dwan vs. Hellmuth" thread that Matt Savage started had 9,000 views in six hours. How many eyeballs would tune in to see the Poker Brat and durrrr trading chips and barbs for hours at a stretch? The mind boggles.


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